Gordon Comstock is a very good advertising copywriter and a pretty bad poet.  But if he indulges his delusion that he can write poetry, he gets to live a bohemian life of chic poverty, easy morality, and reflexive socialism.  Admitting he's really meant to write advertising jingles would require him to settle into a respectable, but dreaded, middle class existence of comfort, family, and an aspidistra in the window.  The horror, the horror....

You can judge who the three most important writers of the last three centuries were by the attempts of both Left and Right to co-opt them and claim them as their own : Adam Smith (18th Century); Alexis de Tocqueville (19th Century); and George Orwell (20th Century).  With the exception of people telling me I'm swinish for not thinking that James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the James brothers (Henry and William) are geniuses, I'd guess that no topic has generated more hostile email to Brothers Judd than our classifying Orwell as a conservative.  These hostile correspondents though never offer any more evidence than the mere fact that Orwell called himself a socialist and fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.  It goes almost without saying that they don't refer to his writings, because it is there that their argument falls apart.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the semi-autobiographical--indeed, Orwell later thought it overly autobiographical--Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The title of the book is awkward and maybe even off-putting, but necessary.  Meanwhile, the filmmakers chose an equally appropriate, but misleading title, for Gordon Comstock is at war on two fronts.  The first is with his long-suffering girlfriend, Rosemary, who he hopes to coerce into bed without marrying :

    Each laughed with delight at the other's absurdities. There was a merry war between them.

The second front is Gordon's war against the money god :

    What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion.  Perhaps it is the only
    real religion--the only really felt religion--that is left to us.  Money is what God used to be.  Good and evil have no meaning any longer
    except failure and success.  Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good.  The decalogue has been reduced to two
    commandments.  One for the employers--the elect, the money-priesthood as it were--'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the
    employed--the slaves and underlings--'Thou shalt not lose thy job.'  It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered
    Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra.  The aspidistra, flower of England!
    It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn.  There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras
    in windows.

By God!  That sounds like a ringing enough call to arms doesn't it?  Except, that is, for the inconvenient title of the novel : Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  This story, like nearly all of Orwell's, is anti-revolutionary and possessed of both a deep love of middle-class England and a good-natured contempt for wealthy socialists (like Comstock's publisher, Ravelston) and all of those (like Gordon himself) who romanticize poverty and the poor.  And so, when Gordon, who by then has been reduced to rather dire straits, finally abandons his life of destitution and the half-written book of inane poems that he'd been writing to resume his advertising job and marry Rosemary, who he's gotten in the family way, it is in no wise a defeat, but a triumph :

    Now that the thing was done he felt nothing but relief; relief that now at last he had finished with dirt, cold, hunger and loneliness and could get back to decent, fully human life.  His resolutions, now that he had broken them, seemed nothing but a frightful weight that he had cast off.  Moreover, he was aware that he was only fulfilling his destiny.  In some corner of his mind he had always known that this would happen.  He thought of the day when he had given them notice at New Albion; and Mr. Erskine's kind, red, beefish face, gently counselling him not to chuck up a 'good' job for nothing.  How bitterly he had sworn, then, that he was done with 'good' jobs for ever!  Yet it was foredoomed that he should come back, and he had known it even then.  And it was not merely because of Rosemary and the baby that he had done it.  That was the obvious cause, the precipitating cause, but even without it the end would have been the same ; if there had been no baby to think about, something else would have forced his hand.  For it was what, in his secret heart, he had desired.

And if that doesn't convince you that the story represents a whole-hearted embrace of bourgeois existence, try this :

    Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into
    something nobler.  The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture
    and their aspidistras--they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency.  The money-code as they
    interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish.  They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour.  They 'kept themselves
    respectable'--kept the aspidistra flying.  Besides, they were alive.  They were bound up in the bundle of life.  They begot children,
    which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

    The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.

Orwell offers up this wisdom with a light touch.  He also has the characteristically brutal honesty to portray Comstock (his younger self) as quite a horse's arse during his bohemian phase.  This comes through even more clearly in the film, where Comstock (as played by Richard E. Grant) is nearly difficult to like, prior to his epiphany.  It is only when he accepts his own responsibility for the life growing in Rosemary that he comes to be "fully human" and likable.

Now, if you can reconcile all of that with a belief that Orwell should be considered a man of the Left and not essentially a conservative, kindly drop us a line and explain.  Meanwhile, we'll keep the aspidistra flying.

FILM GRADE : A-

Buy the book and the film, A Merry War [aka Keep the Aspidistra Flying] (1997) (directed by Robert Beirman) at Amazon.com

(Reviewed:02-Mar-02)

Grade: (A-)